In an Interfaith Symposium for Clergy recently at the Jewish Congregation Emanu-el on the subject of religious fundamentalism, Massa described what Catholic fundamentalism looks like.

He first noted that Catholicism is marked by several doctrinal and theological emphases, such as a radically positive estimation of material reality; its concern for and respect of history; its deep respect for rationality because religious faith must be consonant with reason; and its affirmation of the central role of the community in salvation.

What distinguishes Catholic "orthodoxy" from Catholic "fundamentalism," said Massa, "is that Catholic fundamentalism always takes a sectarian stance within the larger Catholic tradition, rejecting some aspect of Catholicism's commitment to rationality, history, the material world or community."

The sectarian impulse tends to set its face against any accommodation with the world. Any compromise by way of a group's effort to situate itself in a messy historical reality has profoundly negative connotations for the group and represents a betrayal of the original revelation, he said.

Catholic fundamentalists tend to believe that the true form of religion can be found at some earlier, primitive "golden moment," and their duty is to hold on to that perfect embodiment forever. "History, then, far from being the locus where the revelation is explored, elucidated and developed, is rather to be resisted and rejected," said Massa.

"The perfect, primitive embodiment of the faith once delivered to the saints must be delivered to subsequent generations of believers in exactly the same manner, using the same words and symbols and expressed in the same formulations," he said.

Although over the centuries Catholic theologians have offered many models of the church – herald, servant, sacrament, Mystical Body of Christ – Catholic fundamentalists tend to reduce all of them to the church as institution, reducing the question of who is and who is not a member to the question of rules, observed Massa.

"The great Catholic ecclesiologist, Cardinal Avery Dulles, considers this institutional model as representing the least important model, and most Catholic theologians I know would agree with him," he said.

As a classic American instance of Catholic fundamentalism, Massa cited the case of the Jesuit Leonard Feeney, excommunicated in the 1950s for his interpretation of the fourth-century Catholic position "outside the church, no salvation" – a phrase intended to describe the church as the ark of salvation analogous to the people of Israel.

"Almost all mainstream Catholic theologians had interpreted this phrase to mean that the institutional church was the centre of God's salvific purpose," said Massa. Many others, not belonging to the institutional church, belonged to what they called "the soul of the church" and were to be counted among God's chosen people.

The greatest of the medieval Catholic thinkers, St. Thomas Aquinas, argued that many who were institutional Catholics would be lost, and many who were not even Christians, would be saved, Massa said.

But starting in the late 1940s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Feeney began to teach and to preach that everyone who was not a baptized Catholic was damned.

"Feeney offers us a classic example of Catholic fundamentalism – a separatist, ahistorical, anti-pluralistic understanding of Catholicism which views pluralism, accommodation or historical development as a failure of nerve in witnessing to the true message of the Gospel.

"I wish that I could tell you," said Massa, "that Catholic fundamentalism is as dated as the Feeney affair, but alas, I cannot."

(Fr. Ryan directs the Paulist North American Office for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations in New York City.)